Next stop, London

Regular Resourcing Tomorrow guest speaker Dr Elaine Dorward-King’s 30-year mining career included long stints at Rio Tinto and Newmont Mining Corp. She is currently a non-executive director of precious metals-focused Sibanye-Stillwater and leading titanium minerals producer Kenmare Resources.

Richard Roberts: Resourcing Tomorrow is held in early December, which a lot of people say is the best time of year in London. Do you have a favourite time of year and favourite thing you do when you go to London?

Elaine Dorward-King: Well, I like to walk down the streets at night in December and look at the Christmas lights. I will admit it. And I can travel around the world in one little, tiny suitcase most of the time but when I come to London in December I bring a big suitcase because I might want to do a little Christmas shopping. I also need a bigger coat than usual.

A lot of us do drag along a spouse or a partner because it is a fun time of year. It’s a fun time of year to come to Resourcing Tomorrow and then go over to Europe for a couple days or a week and do something around Christmas in Germany or Austria or Switzerland.

Richard Roberts: Do you have a favourite part of London or a place that you love to visit?

Elaine Dorward-King: Well, I love western London. I stay in the West End so I can go the theatre and go to restaurants and visit my friends a little more easily.

Richard Roberts: Is there a place that you'd recommend to first time visitors in London that they simply have to see?

Elaine Dorward-King: Well if you've never, ever been to London you have to go see the Tower of London. It’s got tonnes of history. The tours are interesting. You need to start there. And then after that you could go the British Museum and see the spoils of the Empire.

You’ve got all the other great museums [including] the Natural History Museum. Just walking around, if you’re a tourist; there are little placards on the buildings telling you so-and-so lived here or so-and-so died here. Seeing Buckingham Palace and all the buildings is great fun. One of the reasons London is such a great city is because it's a low city. It doesn't have tonnes of skyscrapers until you get more south and east.

And it’s accessible. If you remember to look up when you’re walking there the architecture is just beautiful.

And then you have to go to a play – a musical or some play with wonderful, famous actors. There's so much good talent in London theatres.

Richard Roberts: There was a think tank conversation in Washington, DC, recently about the metal that will define the period ahead of us. We've had the Bronze Age, the steel age, the silicon age. What metal is going to define the next phase of human advancement?

Elaine Dorward-King: Have we already had the silicon age? My first response would be copper. We were there thousands of years ago. But if you look at our transition to a lower carbon world, the need to transport energy around everywhere, copper is going to be essential for that.

There has been a big rush on lithium, of course, and it’s important. But as we’ve been talking about, technology moves on and people will be looking at lots of different kinds of battery technologies. So lithium probably is going to be important for a long, long time. But is it going to be the key thing? Maybe, maybe not. But I always tell people, copper is a win, win, win. It’s a good metal. It's a happy metal. It’s an essential nutrient. It’s lightweight. We’re going to need it.

Richard Roberts: The NextGen program for students has become a big deal at Resourcing Tomorrow and its sister event in Australia, IMARC. What was something that shaped your path from student to thinking the industry was going to be a key part of your future?

Elaine Dorward-King: Well, it was kind of by accident that I found my way to the mining industry. I got recruited when the mining sector got serious in the early 90s about hiring professionals and people that really wanted to work as an environmental scientist. I had worked in the chemical industry out of graduate school, and then I worked in consulting for a couple of years.

It never occurred to me to work in the mining sector, ever. I grew up in Appalachia. The only mines I knew were nasty little coal mines. But once I got there and I was recruited into a job that I thought was just perfect for me I was treated really well. The work was really interesting. You felt like you were doing something important.

I was given an opportunity but I had the great good fortune to work for some great leaders. And the work went beyond environment, first to safety and health and then to communities and the whole sustainability portfolio, and then I got to run a business for Rio Tinto.

So it’s been a great career. But it never occurred to me that I would have so much fun in the mining sector. I got to go to all these weird places all over the world and meet all these amazing people. I couldn't even pronounce or identify on a map some of the places I've been when I started in 1992.

That’s something we really need to promote to younger folks.

Richard Roberts: Mining has some influential voices, some charismatic leaders, entrepreneurial types, agents of real change. And you've no doubt met a lot of people in the industry who you admire, respect, and maybe some that you don’t so much. But who do you see is as a significant mining influencer, or influencers, today? Are there people that stand out in your mind as people who are really moving the industry forward in new ways and or shifting outside perceptions of the industry?

Elaine Dorward-King: Well, there are a lot of really great leaders that are motivated in the right way for the right things that have done good service for our industry. Some of that comes from being able to think outside the box and so shift direction even though it may not look like success in the beginning; it turns into success later.

And then there are leaders who quietly try to influence in a positive way. So I would mention Neal Froneman, who is the outgoing CEO of Sibanye-Stillwater, as somebody who’s visionary and has put ethics and sustainability at the core of his company and has been very deliberate about the fact that we are going to move downstream and be part of the circular economy and move into battery and electric metals.

I’m on their board so of course I may be biased. But we already are a major recycler of automobile catalysts in the US: Sibanye-Stillwater is the biggest. And the company is moving to do more recycling and more secondary mining. So those three ways to get the materials we need are primary, secondary or recycling. He has had that vision for Sibanye and I think that strategy is not fully understood but will pay in the long run. So that would be an example of someone with an entrepreneurial mindset who also is very committed to the social and environmental and ethical framework that a responsible company should work in.

Preston Chiaro [former Rio Tinto senior executive] is one of the best leaders I have worked for. He excelled at recognising talent in young people regardless of whether they fit the mould of a typical miner and at giving them challenges and opportunities. He was also one of the early thought leaders in the natural resources sector on climate change, the threats and opportunities for the sector, and how we should be thinking strategically about them.

Richard Adkerson at Freeport is another person who has been around for a long time. He recently stepped down as CEO but is still chairman and he chaired the ICMM [International Council on Mining and Metals] for a long time. He has been a stable leader for the industry and ICMM and has provided, again, ethical leadership.

The thing that will define our acceptance in society in the long run is not what we do but how we do it. How we go about exploring, developing, operating and closing our mining operations. I think Richard's a good example of somebody that has been a steady voice on responsible mining for a considerably long time.

I worked for Leigh Clifford when I was at Rio Tinto. He was a very good leader of people and was essential in turning the industry's view of safety around; that it was not every man for himself out there running an operation and that, in fact, we were going to operate as a global company with a set of safety standards that protected people whether they worked in Australia, Guinea or South Africa.

Mark Cutifani [former Anglo American CEO] is a motivational leader.

I think we need a variety of these people. But we’ve got a lot of good leaders.